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Recommended controller for home drip system

I finally added an inexpensive controller to a drip system I've been piecing together as we've added shrubs and trees over the past few years. However, it's maximum run time per station is only four hours. I'd prefer to run each station longer. While I was running the stations manually it wasn't uncommon for me to let them run 24 or even more hours.

My question is: are there controllers that are designed for this kind of running time, and if so what's the best way to find and compare?

3 program timer with up to 4 start times per day will accomodate this. rainbird esp modular,hunter exc. this can be achieved by assigning 3 start times on that specific zone under all 3 programs (a,b,c)

You ask a good question. It starts from always having been taught to water long/deep vs. frequently/shallow. Growing up we had water turns every 8 days or so that lasted something like 14 hours. So everything got watered on that schedule, and I guess I'm taking the same principles even further.

Since you asked the question I've done a little research and it looks like I should be determining how long the water really needs to be on so that I'm watering enough, but not over-watering. This document: http://ag.arizona.edu/pubs/water/az1298.pdf suggests using a "soil probe" to see how deep the water is getting for a given watering. It also suggests that I might want to have more drippers per plant than I currently have.

So I guess this all means that I need to do some homework before I can really say how long I need to run each zone.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by h2pro</i>
<br />3 program timer with up to 4 start times per day will accomodate this. rainbird esp modular,hunter exc. this can be achieved by assigning 3 start times on that specific zone under all 3 programs (a,b,c)
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

I was thinking something along these lines as well.

I've got a cheap controller (least expensive thing I could find at Lowes to use as a temporary controller... but as time goes buy, temporary seems to becoming a little more permanent). Anyway, even this cheap controller has a feature to run zones multiple times in a day.